the Choirboys (1996) (26 page)

Two weeks before Tommy Rivers died Baxter Slate received the second radio call to the Rivers home. This one from a neighbor on the other side of the street who reported that there was definitely something wrong. Tommy had come to live with his mother nine months before but had been seen only occasionally as he sat with a brother or sister in the front yard.

"I believe he's a sick boy," the woman had said to Baxter Slate when he responded to the radio call.

And this time Baxter Slate did overstep his authority a bit in demanding to see Tommy Rivers and scaring Lena Rivers with an implied threat to call in Juvenile officers if she refused.

Lena Rivers finally consented, and the gaunt young woman with bright darting eyes went to the bedroom and returned with a dirty but obviously fat and healthy child of seven who smiled at the policeman and asked to touch his gun.

"Satisfied?" Lena Rivers said. "Meddling neighbors ought to mind their own business."

Baxter Slate looked at Lena Rivers, at her scraggly colorless ponytail and dark rimmed blinking eyes, at the face already starting to bloat from alcohol despite her skinny build and relative youthfulness.

"That little boy looks different from when I saw him last," said Baxter.

"When did you see him?" the woman slurred as Baxter smelled the booze.

"I was called here once before," Baxter said, still standing in the doorway. "I was the one you let into the bedroom to look at Tommy, remember?"

"Oh yeah. You're gonna spend your career hassling me, is that it?"

"No, I guess not," Baxter said.

Every skill he had picked up during his four years as a policeman told him that this woman was lying. As with most policemen the hardest thing to learn was what consummate liars people are, and it was even more difficult for Baxter because he had been brought up to believe there is such a thing as unvarnished truth and that most people speak it.

"Is that the same boy I saw before?" Baxter asked and he believed it was a lie when she said, "Of course it is!"

"What's your name, son?" Baxter asked, stooping and smiling at the child.

"Tommy Rivers," the boy said and looked up at his mother.

"I don't believe that's the same child I saw. He was thin, very very thin."

"So he's gained a few pounds. He was sick. Did my nosy neighbor tell you he was sick?"

And Baxter Slate nodded because the neighbor had said that, and yet.

"Look," Baxter said, trying his broad winning smile on Lena Rivers, "this is my second call here. Tell you what, I'll just come in for a look around and then everybody'll be satisfied and you won't see me again. Okay?"

And then the woman stepped out on the porch in the sunlight and Baxter was no longer looking at her through the screen door and could see the yellow pouches around her sparkling demented eyes.

"You been cooperated with all you're gonna be. You got no right here and I want you outta my face and off my property. So I don't keep a spic and span house, so what? My kids're cared for and here's the one you're so goddamn worried about. Now tell that bitch she got any more complaints I'll go over there and kick her ass all over the neighborhood!"

Lena Rivers went inside and slammed the door, leaving Baxter Slate standing indecisively on the front porch.

For months after that Baxter wondered how much of his hesitancy would be attributed to his boarding school politeness and whether perhaps the more obtrusive working class produced the best cops after all, that perhaps police departments were foolish to recruit from any other social group.

But no matter how many times he postulated a hypothetical situation to other policemen, never daring to admit to them he had contact with Tommy Rivers, he had to come to the inescapable conclusion that very few would have stood on that porch. As tentative as Hamlet. Only to wipe sweat from his hat brim and drive away to another call.

The answers to his hypothetical question varied slightly:

"I think I'd have called for a backup unit and maybe a supervisor or Juvenile officer and gone on in. I mean if I really suspected she had switched kids on me." That from Father Willie Wright.

"I'da walked over the cunt and looked for the little whelp." That from Roscoe Rules.

Not one of the choirboys, and he asked each privately, had suggested that he would consider that there was not enough probable cause to enter the woman's home or cause her further discomfiture. Most agreed with Francis Tanaguchi who shrugged and said, "I don't worry about it when a little kid's safety's at stake. If the court wants to kick the case out, groovy, but I'll see that the kid's okay."

They thought it absurd even to consider constitutional questions which get in the way of police work. "We'll worry about the United States Supreme Court when we're writing our arrest reports," as Spencer Van Moot succinctly put it. And Baxter Slate believed that was the, general attitude of all policemen, not just the choirboys, It was absurdly easy for any high school graduate with a year's police experience to skirt the most sophisticated and intricate edict arrived at by nine aging men who could never guard against the fact that restrictive rules of law simply produced facile liars among policemen. There wasn't a choirboy who had not lied in probable cause situations to ensure a prosecution of a guilty defendant.

Not a choirboy except Baxter Slate who had heard too much about Truth and Honor and Sin in Dominican schools. Even Father Willie Wright lied but when he did it from the witness stand he always held his hands under his legs, fingers crossed.

And in the case of Tommy Rivers Baxter Slate need not have lied. He simply had to open the unlocked door and enter Lena Rivers' home and walk through her house ignoring her drunken threats and search for the real Tommy Rivers. But since he had only a suspicion, since he was riot sure, since he could never be convinced that people lied so outrageously, since it was too bizarre to suspect foul play when Mrs. Rivers had several other healthy children, since he was Baxter Slate and not Roscoe Rules, he threw in his hand and lost to a bluff. And Lena Rivers was free to continue with her gradual murder of Tommy Rivers.

When Baxter Slate read Bruce Simpson's arrest report the first time, his heart was banging so loud he actually believed the man next to him could hear it, and he foolishly cleared his throat and shuffled his feet on the asphalt tile in the squadroom. The second time through the report he believed his heart had stopped, so shallow was his breathing. The third time through he didn't think about his heart at all.

Bruce Simpson's arrest report was a minor classic in kiddy cop circles because he did not write like most policemen in the bald vernacular: "Person reporting stated Arresting officer Simpson composed a horror story which included every tiny fragment of gruesome detail-when it was necessary and when it was not. Simpson did it because there was a policewoman named Doris Guber, whose pants Simpson was trying to penetrate, who loved to work the sex detail and always asked teenage runaways about their illicit sex lives and included in her reports exactly how many times an illicit penis was inserted and withdrawn from an illicit vagina. Which wasn't all that important to the prosecution of delinquent youngsters.

Doris always loved to find out about the orgasm, whether it occurred, and if so how big it was and of what duration. She'd get Simpson hot just talking about it so he started doing his reports the same way.

"Did you have an orgasm with the girl?" Doris once asked a surly eighteen year old black boy she wanted to prosecute for banging his neighbor.

"Did I have a what?"

"Did you come?" asked Doris Guber, eyes shining.

"Oh yeah. Like a hound dog."

Bruce Simpson's inimitably colorful prose left nothing out. The pages reeked of agony and death. He described how Lena Rivers had shredded the little sailor suit from Tommy Rivers the first day. He hypothesized how Tommy had resembled the long gone, fair haired sailor who had shattered the romantic dreams of Lena Rivers by taking his discharge from the Navy, and heading for parts unknown. Bruce Simpson delineated in the sharpest detail how Tommy Rivers entered hell that day and was not released from torment until he died ten months later.

Lena Rivers had begun by subjecting Tommy to a sustained barrage of verbal abuse which was unrelenting up to and including the period when daily beatings gave way to starvation and torture. But as cruel as Lena Rivers was to Tommy she was kinder than ever before to her other three children who ranged in age from seven to ten. And she was exceptionally kind to the older children of the neighborhood and frequently entertained the teenage boys by supplying beer and gambling money from her bimonthly checks from the Bureau of Public Assistance and finally by deflowering three of them after a game of strip poker."

It became gossip among the adolescents of the block that Lena Rivers was awfully tough on the new arrival, her six year old son Tommy. Then later it was positively established that at least two of the lads, who were learning more than poker from Lena Rivers, had seen acts amounting to felony crimes committed on Tommy Rivers. Lena had been observed on two occasions thrusting the boy's hand into the flame of the gas stove for bedwetting. On another occasion she had ordered the child to copulate orally one of her poker playing sixteen year old lovers but the older boy claimed he declined, during his testimony at Lena's trial. Finally, no less than three teenage boys who were ordinary products of the ordinary neighborhood saw Lena Rivers carrying the naked, screaming, twenty-eight pound child through the house by a pair of pliers clamped to his penis.

Lena Rivers had less exotic punishment for Tommy Rivers during that ten month siege of terror, such as locking him in a kitchen broom closet every time he cried for his grandmother whom he would never see again. The broom closet eventually became a refuge for Tommy, and Lena Rivers would often forget he was there and leave him alone in the peaceful darkness for hours at a time. His older siblings sometimes brought food to him beyond his daily ration but never enough to sustain him in health, and eventually the broom closet became his permanent bedroom. He built himself a nest of rags and newspapers next to a water heater which was warm in the night.

Baxter Slate was always to rationalize that even if he had been less indecisive that day he might never have found the little figure cowering in the corner of the broom closet, might never have verified his suspicions that Lena Rivers had shown him the wrong son.

Baxter was to question more experienced Juvenile officers at a later time and consult texts on abnormal psychology and ask again and again: "But how could the other children, especially the older neighborhood children, have failed to report it to the police? They knew what was going on. Even the little ones knew how wrong it was!"

But the most frequent explanation was: "Kids are awfully curious and have a morbid fascination for the bizarre. She was supplying booze and sex for the older ones and her own could see by Tommy what could happen to them if Mama stopped loving them, so."

Later as a kiddy cop Baxter encountered case after case of witnesses who ignored flagrant acts of brutality, not just youngsters, but adults: neighbors and family. Then Baxter Slate, former Roman Catholic, age twenty-six, learned how tenuous is the life of the soul. And realized that his soul, if he truly had one, was starting to die.

Baxter asked for and received a transfer back to patrol for "personal reasons" and decided to quit police work. But he made inquiries and discovered how valueless was his education in the classics. He had an offer to teach elementary school but that job was conditional since Baxter did not have a teaching credential and had not the ambition to get one. And actually, policemen received a better wage.

So he became satisfied with working uniform patrol again and did not aspire to a more exalted position. He never again tried to borrow money from his mother who was now divorced for the fourth time, and most of all he was very cautious never to let anyone know he was intelligent and educated since it could offend people like Roscoe Rules who assumed that Baxter had studied police science in college.

Baxter always made it a point to throw a few "don'ts" in place of "doesn'ts" in his conversation with other policemen and unless he was drunk at choir practice he never used adverbs in the presence of Roscoe Rules who became infuriated because it sounded so faggy.

Tommy Rivers, reduced to a shroud of flesh on a little skeleton, eventually died from the blow of a hammer that a healthy child could probably have survived. Lena Rivers was arrested, giving Bruce Simpson the opportunity to titillate Doris Cuber with his purple prose. And Baxter Slate quit being a Juvenile officer because he thought he was the worst one in history and intensified his relationship with Foxy Farrell. He only broke it off when during their mating she bit into his chest so savagely she tore the skin and kissed him with a bloody mouth crooning, "You liked it, Baxter! You liked it, you bastard! Admit it, you pig motherfucker! Want me to do it again? Or do you want me to tell you what I did to Goldie last night after I left you? Goldie's cock is so."

And then Baxter was weeping for shame and fury and was backhanding Foxy Farrell and more blood was on her mixing with his blood. Then her eyes glassed over and grabbed his wrists and the words dripped like blood from thin dark lips "That's enough. I know what you like, honey. It's okay. Mama knows. Mama knows."